Cover video captured with my Meta Glasses and downloaded over WiFi Direct at the Yacht Club — Thank you Team!
Good engineering strives for simplicity. We remove building blocks until the system is as simple as can be. When we reach this stage, we call it elegant. It’s hard to design but easier to debug and maintain. And yet, the products we love are full of hidden complexity.
I look at my Meta glasses that can sync over my home WiFi, over Bluetooth and over a direct WiFi connection. I imagine the discussions between an engineering team who is trying to minimize scope to increase quality and meet deadlines. And on the other side, the product team who wants the experience of syncing at home to be invisible, but also wants to make sure that you can get your photos and videos even when you are not on your home network. And so instead of building just one sync system, they have built two. One which uses the cloud as the source of truth. And another one that manages this in the app locally and that needs to work without the cloud. So much additional complexity, just so that I can download and share my videos immediately with my friends, without waiting to go home.
I used to think that building two systems to achieve one result was a sign of a poor design. That my job as an engineer was to strive for simplicity, to find the simplest way to build the product, even if it sometimes leaked into the user experience.
Now I rationalize this differently. These are good design choices because in product engineering, the only trade-off that beats simple engineering is one that simplifies the experience for the user. Even when it comes at great cost.